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The Dub Side
After reading this passage From Jeff Chang’s Can’t Stop Won’t Stop, it occurred to me that I tend to seek out and emphasize the dub version of culture:
While singers and DJs offered words of mourning or escape for the sufferers, dub reggae-the mostly wordless music of dread-ran directly into the heart of the darkness. In Perry”s “Revelation Dub,” time was creakily kept by a distended, phasing hi-hat and Romeo’s vocal was either reduced to the low hum of some distant street protest or chopped into sudden nonsensical stabs-“Warinna!” “Balwarin!”- as if all words, even warnings, could not be trusted. The riddim-which Marley would later version for “Three Little Birds,” with its bright chorus, “Don’t worry about a thing, ‘cause every little thing’s gonna be alright”-was swung off its moorings, the textual integrity and authority was undermined. Perry’s sound was the epitome of sipple[meaning slippery, precarious]. Dub answered the question: what kind of mirror is it that reflects everything but the person looking into it?
“Dub had a compelling circularity. It exploded in the dancehall at the moment the tenement yards exploded in violence. Dub was the “B-side” to the soaring visions of the democratic socialist dreamers or the apocalyptic warning of the Rasta prophets. As reggae historian Steve Barrow says, “The music of dub represents literally and figuratively ‘the other side.’ There’s an up and a down, there’s an A-side and a B-Side. It’s a dialectical world.”
Mariah Speaks!
To be read aloud:
A lot of people are singing about how screwed up the world is, and I don’t think that everybody wants to hear about that all the time.
—Mariah Carey
Basically, I started singing when I started talking. Music has just been my saving grace my whole life.
—Mariah Carey
Butterflies are always following me, everywhere I go.
—Mariah Carey
Forget the image, forget the ensemble, forget the rumours, forget the short skirts, the big hair, whatever! I owe this to the fans and I will never forget you so I want to accept this award on behalf of all of you.
—Mariah Carey
No Empty Space
There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot. For certain engineering purposes, it is desirable to have as silent a situation as possible. Such a room is called an anechoic chamber […] a room without echoes. I entered one at Harvard University several years ago and heard two sounds, one high and one low. When I described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one my blood in circulation. Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death.
—John Cage